Walt Disney WorldA History in PostcardsChapter 10 The Animation Gallery Page 2 More
Scenes from the Screen

You may have noticed on the last page that the cards in the first part of this
series (which I have been displaying in numerical order), work their way
through the animated Classics in Chronological order. They continue that trend
on this page up through and including the latest release
(at the time of the studios opening in May of 1989) Oliver and Company.

Eyvind Earle and Sleeping
Beauty

Here is a card that, like that postcard of Geppettos music box on the first
page of this chapter, doesn't feature any characters. It shows a background
from Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty was different from a lot of the other
Disney films, some of that was intentional, and some wasn't. Walt didn't
want this tale of a fairy-tale princess to not seem to similar to things they
had done before. In fact, very little was used of what was developed for this
film when they first approached this subject in 1952. As time went on they
found some directions to take that helped set it apart from other films.
One of those things were the backgrounds which were based on art from the
medieval period, two of the things that they keyed in on from the art of that
period were the equal clarity of objects at all distances , so that items far
in the background often have detail as sharp as the foreground objects and the
other attribute often noted in common with medieval art works the orientation
of all objects into sharp vertical and horizontal planes. Eyvind Earle an
artist with a respectable resume
even before he joined Disney was the Production Designer,and
Color Stylist for the movie and began working on the Background
Paintings early on, at the same time Walt was taking on a lot of
new projects the biggest of which Disneyland, caused him to also
delve into the then brand-new field of television with three
television shows, including Disneyland (the original name of what
I grew up knowing as The Wonderful World of Disney),and the
Mickey Mouse Club. So people were being pulled off into these
other projects and Eyvind was continued to work away on the
intricately detailed backgrounds, since it ended up being in
production for nearly six years, Mr. Earle ended up doing the
majority of the production backgrounds for the entire film
himself. This card it seems is a tribute to that detailed work
that so often goes unnoticed as we admire the lovely human
figures like the one drawn by Marc Davis for the previous card in this series which
features that title beauty set in another of Mr. Earles beautiful
backgrounds.

Here perhaps we should note that the series takes a large
chronological jump, none of the Disney animated films of the
1960's and 70's were represented. Still I would not read to much
into this, the early Disney films and the most recent films were
the highest priorities for good reason, the most recent films
because those guests who had been to a Disney movie in the past
few years would want things relating to those films, and the
oldest and most classic films because, they were from Disney's
"golden Age", almost everyone had seen them in re-issues, or on
TV over the years and they were the films most closely identified
with Disney. Still almost all of us will find one or another
omitted film as one that we particularly enjoy, for me the most
glaring omissions are Fantasia, The Jungle Book, and taking into
account that the next card in the series is from a combination
animated and live action film, Mary Poppins should have been
included of course! But at least a few of these subjects were
covered in the "Sketch pad" portion of this series.

The "Sketch pad" Character
series

Scenes from movies weren't the only cards featured in these cards
from the animation gallery a whole other group of cards were done
from artists sketches and using "pencil test" animation drawings.
Just what is "pencil test" animation you may wonder? When an
animator is done with roughing out the scene he is animating. the
rough animation drawing done by pencil which has no paint or
clean up is filmed, the test can be viewed by the director to see
if there are any problems with the animation before the clean up
artist does the clean up drawings and the paint department does
painting on cels. In addition to using different types of art
work than the first cards in this seriesE-mail Me
martsolf@mindspring.com

Last modified by Brian K Martsolf at 04-Mar-2005 04:01 PM
much of the information about Slppeping Beauty on this page came from a bonus
feature, that is after the movie, on the late 1990s video tape release.